The present invention relates to point of purchase display systems. More particularly, the invention relates to strip merchandisers for product display.
Merchandise presentation must satisfy the requirements of both retailers and suppliers. Retailers demand displays which will allow normal presentation of products, adapt to existing fixtures and require minimal installation, e.g., come with the product loaded and ready to sell. Suppliers need a display which can be assembled and shipped with minimal labor, material and storage requirements.
One known way of display merchandise is via an elongate plastic strip (i.e. a strip merchandiser) which is suspended from the front edge of a merchandise display shelf or the like to itself suspend apertured products, such as blister packs, for display. The strips are usually made from a die cut plastic material and have a series of spaced slits which, when the material is pushed out of the plane of the strip, form integral upwardly facing individual support hooks for the products. Adjacent each upwardly facing hook or tongue are a pair of downwardly facing tongues. The various tongues are defined in the strip merchandiser by a continuous slit. The downwardly facing tongues serve to prevent the package, once it is suspended from the upwardly facing tongue, from being detached therefrom during transit and display. The downwardly facing tongues have to be pushed out of the way in order to allow the package to be unhooked from the upwardly facing tongue. At their upper end, the strips have a mounting portion of one form or another for attaching the strip to the shelf. The loaded strip can thus be hung from price channels, shelves, walls, gondolas, wire racks or S-hooks by the retailer.
When an item of merchandise is removed from the strip, the corresponding support hook remains empty. An accumulation of empty support hooks results in an unappealing merchandise display. It is now known that strip merchandisers can be made with adjacent sections that are separated by a weakened line, such as a score line. This construction allows an empty section of the strip to be either folded behind or torn away from the remaining full sections of the strip.
The problem with all such known merchandisers is that they must be manually flexed through approximately 180 degrees at each hanging point, or hook, in order to allow the merchandise to be hung from the strip. This process of manual flexing is labor-intensive and time consuming. Therefore, it is an expensive process for loading the strips with merchandise.
One known strip merchandiser has a series of vertically spaced tabs that need to be flexed out of the plane of the remainder of the strip merchandiser in order to hang product thereon. However, this known merchandiser includes a pair of securing protrusions one located on either side of a tip of each support hook in order to prevent packages from becoming detached from the hook during transit and display. The disadvantage of this known strip merchandiser is that each hook or tongue must still be flexed out of the plane of the remainder of the strip merchandiser in order to allow merchandise to be hung from the strip. This process of manual flexing of the hooks or tongues is labor intensive and time consuming and hence disadvantageous.
Accordingly, it has been considered desirable to develop a new and improved easy to load strip merchandiser which would overcome the foregoing difficulties and others while providing better and more advantageous overall results.